Sunday, June 25, 2017

6 Things You Need To Know About The Senate’s Obamacare-Lite Bill

So, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has done precisely what everyone expected: he has unveiled a watered-down version of the already weak House Republican Trumpcare bill. The bill is actually so weak that even Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber is chortling that it doesn’t actually repeal Obamacare.

That’s because it doesn’t.

That doesn’t mean that every provision is bad. It does mean that the bill does little or nothing to lower premiums, undermines the solvency of insurance companies, and makes changes to Medicaid so far down the road that they may never materialize.

But the bill does do three crucial things that Republicans want: it restructures an entitlement, which is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s raison d’etre; it provides the necessary government cutbacks to allow the Congressional Budget Office to score savings which will then be applied to tax reform; and it allows Republicans to brag emptily about having “repealed” Obamacare. In the short term, all of that may provide a bit of salve for a largely-useless Congressional term. But in the mid- to long-term, it’s actually disastrous: by preserving Obamacare’s key provisions and calling it a “free market reform,” when premiums go up and insurance companies go out of business, Republicans and the free market will take ownership. The next step will be a swing into Bernie Sanders’ Medicaid-for-all column from voters.

Here’s what you need to know. --->

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